Many years ago a fellow club photographer gave me a DVD copied from a low grade tape, copied from who knows where, this low production value DVD was a revelation to me and I have since watched it many times over. It is a very British portrayal of a very British Photographer, who's work I think ranks in the highest echelons of monochromatic landscape photography, yet you have probably never heard of him. He also uses a process you have probably never heard of and a workflow of such rough and ready methods that you will simply not believe what you are seeing. But the results are astounding and the equal of any landscape photographer past or present, yes I really do mean past or present.

They say Photoshop has removed any remaining truth within photography and how back in the old days, it was oh so different then, because we couldn't do the tricks that modern photographers can do with their computers - wrong!

So if I have sparked your interest with my overly grand introduction and you want to know who the heck I could be talking about, then I suggest you pour yourself a nice glass of wine, hook up your computer to your wide screen TV and sit back and watch a very pleasant one and a half hours of pure photographic magic.

Thanks for the link. I have a soft spot for alternative processes and been printing platinum/palladium for several years. This summer's project is the carbon transfer process, which is somewhat similar to the bromoil method. It's amazing the manipulations he can execute entirely in analog.

I've looked, tried to understand the 'why' and have given up trying to do so. Yes, clever, but just so removed from straight photographic printing techniques that it goes to a place that doesn't attract me at all.

There may be something to a finished print in the flesh, as it were, but for me, it doesn't come off as looking exciting on video.

This isn't to knock the idea at all - just that it leaves me, personally, out in the cold.

In a way, it's pretty much what I find I don't like about some contemporary model shots, but in the opposite direction: some over-worked model shots turn people into plastic, and these things in the videos go the other way and produce mud. I suppose that straight photography exists because it is so much more attractive...?

What does that have to do with anything? We'll all join him sooner or later.

And one of the reasons that I think Inheritance Tax is so iniquitous: we're not going to take it with us, so why should governments feel entitled to steal it instead? If you did that without being in government, you'd get arrested. Anything you leave behind is still going to end up in the shops and circulating to the good of the economy and raising eventual tax revenue - taxing it directly just because someone died is a form, a particularly nasty form of bloody theft and nothing more.

...this was a nice glimpse, peek through the surface and between the spaces hidden there with a perfectly wonderful gentleman who radiated a personal calm and contentment as he walked us through his process/way of vision...I find it illuminating to feel the vision of others as they express and recall that vision...

he understood layers and feathering radius well ahead of me, but what really resonated was his easy means of dwelling in his vision without needing to give that space a name...the tools we try to apply if we live long enough disappear and what they allow to fly free become easy extensions of our expression....

So thank you Dave for this visit which I am personally glad to have shared...

The guy was highly skilled at his craft, but I question the craft. Maybe it is more acceptable these days given the amount of fakery that goes on with digital files. For better or for worse I am a Modernist at post and a Post-Modernist in my dreams but using one medium as a means of replicating - or attempting to replicate - another medium falls a long way short for me.

...this was a nice glimpse, peek through the surface and between the spaces hidden there with a perfectly wonderful gentleman who radiated a personal calm and contentment as he walked us through his process/way of vision...I find it illuminating to feel the vision of others as they express and recall that vision...

he understood layers and feathering radius well ahead of me, but what really resonated was his easy means of dwelling in his vision without needing to give that space a name...the tools we try to apply if we live long enough disappear and what they allow to fly free become easy extensions of our expression....

So thank you Dave for this visit which I am personally glad to have shared...